To pass is to sin against authenticity, and “authenticity” is among the founding lies of the modern age. The philosopher Charles Taylor summarizes its ideology thus: “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.” And Romantic fallacy of authenticity is only compounded when it is collectivized: when the putative real me gives way to the real us. You can say that Anatole Broyard was (by any juridical reckoning) “really” a Negro, without conceding that a Negro is a thing you can really be. The vagaries of racial identity were increased by what anthropologists call the rule of “hypodescent”—the one-drop rule. When those of mixed ancestry—and the majority of blacks are of mixed ancestry—disappear into the white majority, they are traditionally accused of running from their “blackness.” Yet why isn’t the alternative a matter of running from their “whiteness”? To emphasize these perversities, however, is a distraction from a larger perversity. You can’t get race “right” by refining the boundary conditions.
The act of razoring out your contributor’s note may be quixotic, but it is not mad. The mistake is to assume that birth certificates and biographical sketches and all the other documents generated by the modern bureaucratic state reveal an anterior truth—that they are merely signs of an independently existing identity. But in fact they constitute it. The social meaning of race is established by these identity papers—by tracts and treatises and certificates and pamphlets and all the other verbal artifacts that proclaim race to be real and, by that proclamation, make it so.
So here is a man who passed for white because he wanted to be a writer, and he did not want to be a Negro writer. It is a crass disjunction, but it is not his crassness or his disjunction. His perception was perfectly correct. He would have had to be a Negro writer, which was something he did not want to be. In his terms, he did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy. We give lip service to the idea of the writer who happens to be black, but had anyone, in the postwar era, ever seen such a thing?
Broyard’s friend Richard A. Shweder, an anthropologist and a theorist of culture, says, “I think he believed that reality is constituted by style,” and ascribes to Broyard a “deeply romantic view of the intimate connection between style and reality.” Broyard passed not because he thought that race wasn’t important but because he knew that it was. The durable social facts of race were beyond reason, and, like Paul Broyard’s furniture, their strength came at the expense of style. Anatole Broyard lived in a world where race had, indeed, become a trope for indelibility, for permanence. “All I have to do,” a black folk saying has it, “is stay black and die.”
Broyard was a connoisseur of the liminal—of crossing over and, in the familiar phrase, getting over. But the ideologies of modernity have a kicker, which is that they permit no exit. Racial recusal is a forlorn hope. In a system where whiteness is the default, racelessness is never a possibility. You cannot opt out; you can only opt in. In a scathing review of a now forgotten black author, Broyard announced that it was time to reconsider the assumption of many black writers that “‘whitey’ will never let you forget you’re black.” For his part, he wasn’t taking any chances. At a certain point, he seems to have decided that all he had to do was stay white and die.
In 1989, Broyard resolved that he and his wife would change their life once more. With both their children grown, they could do what they pleased. And what they pleased—what he pleased, anyway—was to move to Cambridge, Massachusetts. They would be near Harvard, and so part of an intellectual community. He had a vision of walking through Harvard Square, bumping into people like the sociologist Daniel Bell, and having conversations about ideas in the street. Besides, his close friend Michael Miller was living in the area. Anne Bernays, also a Cambridge resident, says, “I remember his calling several times and asking me about neighborhoods. It was important for him to get that right. I think he was a little disappointed when he moved that it wasn’t to a fancy neighborhood like Brattle or Channing Street. He was on Wendell Street, where there’s a tennis court across the street and an apartment building and the houses are fairly close together.” It wasn’t a matter of passing so much as of positioning.
Sandy says that they had another the-children-must-be-told conversation shortly before the move. “We were driving to Michael’s fiftieth-birthday party—I used to plan to bring up the subject in a place where he couldn’t walk out. I brought it up then because at that point our son was out of college and our daughter had just graduated, and my feeling was that they just absolutely needed to know, as adults.” She pauses. “And we had words. He would just bring down this gate.” Sandy surmises, again, that he may have wanted to protect them from what he had experienced as a child. “Also,” she says, “I think he needed still to protect himself.” The day after they moved into their house on Wendell Street, Broyard learned that he had prostate cancer, and that it was inoperable.
Broyard spent much of the time before his death, fourteen months later, making a study of the literature of illness and death, and publishing a number of essays on the subject. Despite the occasion, they were imbued with an almost dandyish, even jokey sense of incongruity: “My urologist, who is quite famous, wanted to cut off my testicles. . . . Speaking as a surgeon, he said that it was the surest, quickest, neatest solution. Too neat, I said, picturing myself with no balls. I knew that such a solution would depress me, and I was sure that depression is bad medicine.” He had attracted notice in 1954 with the account of his father’s death from a similar cancer; now he recharged his writing career as a chronicler of his own progress toward death. He thought about calling his collection of writings on the subject “Critically Ill.” It was a pun he delighted in.
Soon after the diagnosis was made, he was told that he might have “in the neighborhood of years.” Eight months later, it became clear that this prognosis was too optimistic. Richard Shweder, the anthropologist, talks about a trip to France that he and his wife made with Anatole and Sandy not long before Anatole’s death. One day, the two men were left alone. Shweder says, “And what did he want to do? He wanted to throw a ball. The two of us just played catch, back and forth.” The moment, he believes, captures Broyard’s athleticism, his love of physical grace.
Broyard spent the last five weeks of his life at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston. In therapy sessions, the need to set things straight before the end had come up again—the need to deal with unfinished business and, most of all, with his secret. He appeared willing, if reluctant, to do so. But by now he was in almost constant pain, and the two children lived in different places, so the opportunities to have the discussion as a family were limited. “Anatole was in such physical pain that I don’t think he had the wherewithal,” Sandy says. “So he missed the opportunity to tell the children himself.” She speaks of the expense of spirit, of psychic energy, that would have been required. The challenge would have been to explain why it had remained a secret. And no doubt the old anxieties were not easily dispelled: would it have been condemned as a Faustian bargain or understood as a case of personality over-spilling, or rebelling against, the reign of category?
It pains Sandy even now that the children never had the chance to have an open discussion with their father. In the event, she felt that they needed to know before he died, and, for the first time, she took it upon herself to declare what her husband could not. It was an early afternoon, ten days before his death, when she sat down with her two children on a patch of grass across the street from the institute. “They knew there was a family secret, and they wanted to know what their father had to tell them. And I told them.”
The stillness of the afternoon was undisturbed. She says carefully, “Their first reaction was relief th
at it was only this, and not an event or circumstance of larger proportions. Only following their father’s death did they begin to feel the loss of not having known. And of having to reformulate who it was that they understood their father—and themselves—to be.”
At this stage of his illness, Anatole was moving in and out of lucidity, but in his room Sandy and the children talked with humor and irony about secrets and about this particular secret. Even if Anatole could not participate in the conversation, he could at least listen to it. “The nurses said that hearing was the last sense to go,” Sandy says.
It was not as she would have planned it. She says, gently, “Anatole always found his own way through things.”
The writer Leslie Garis, a friend of the Broyards’ from Connecticut, was in Broyard’s room during the last weekend of September, 1990, and recorded much of what he said on his last day of something like sentience. He weighed perhaps seventy pounds, she guessed, and she describes his jaundice-clouded eyes as having the permanently startled look born of emaciation. He was partly lucid, mostly not. There are glimpses of his usual wit, but in a mode more aleatoric than logical. He spoke of Robert Graves, of Sheri Martinelli, of John Hawkes interpreting Miles Davis. He told Sandy that he needed to find a place to go where he could “protect his irony.” As if, having been protected by irony throughout his life, it was now time to return the favor.
“I think friends are coming, so I think we ought to order some food,” he announced hours before he lapsed into his final coma. “We’ll want cheese and crackers, and Faust.”
“Faust?” Sandy asked.
Anatole explained, “He’s the kind of guy who makes the Faustian bargain, and who can be happy only when the thing is revealed.”
A memorial service, held at a Congregationalist church in Connecticut, featured august figures from literary New York, colleagues from the Times, and neighbors and friends from the Village and the Vineyard. Charles Simmons told me that he was surprised at how hard he took Broyard’s death. “You felt that you were going to have him forever, the way you feel about your own child,” he said. “There was something wrong about his dying, and that was the reason.” Speaking of the memorial service, he says, marveling, “You think that you’re the close friend, you know? And then I realized that there were twenty people ahead of me. And that his genius was for close friends.”
Indeed, six years after Broyard’s death many of his friends seem to be still mourning his loss. For them he was plainly a vital principle, a dancer and romancer, a seducer of men and women. (He considered seduction, he wrote, “the most heartfelt literature of the self.”) Sandy tells me, simply, “You felt more alive in his presence,” and I’ve heard almost precisely the same words from a great many others. They felt that he lived more intensely than other men. They loved him—perhaps his male friends especially, or, anyway, more volubly—and they admired him. They speak of a limber beauty, of agelessness, of a radiance. They also speak of his excesses and his penchant for poses. Perhaps, as the bard has it, Broyard was “much more the better for being a little bad.”
And if his presence in American fiction was pretty much limited to other people’s novels, that is no small tribute to his personal vibrancy. You find him reflected and refracted in the books of his peers, like Anne Bernays (she says there is a Broyard character in every novel she’s written) and Brossard and Gaddis, of course, but also in those of his students. His own great gift was as a feuilletonist. The personal essays collected in “Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes” can put you in mind of “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. They are brief impromptus, tonally flawless. To read them is to feel that you are in the company of someone who is thinking things through. The essays are often urbane and sophisticated, but not unbearably so, and they can be unexpectedly moving. Literary culture still fetishizes the novel, and there he was perhaps out of step with his times. Sandy says, “In the seventies and eighties, the trend, in literature and film, was to get sparer, and the flourish of Anatole’s voice was dependent on the luxuriance of his language.” Richard Shweder says, “It does seem that Anatole’s strength was the brief, witty remark. It was aphoristic. It was the critical review. He was brilliant in a thousand or two thousand words.” Perhaps he wasn’t destined to be a novelist, but what of it? Broyard was a Negro who wanted to be something other than a Negro, a critic who wanted to be something other than a critic. Broyard, you might say, wanted to be something other than Broyard. He very nearly succeeded.
Shirley Broyard Williams came to his memorial service, and many of his friends—including Alfred Kazin, who delivered one of the eulogies—remember being puzzled and then astonished as they realized that Anatole Broyard was black. For Todd and Bliss, however, meeting Aunt Shirley was, at last, a flesh-and-blood confirmation of what they had been told. Shirley is sorry that they didn’t meet sooner, and she remains baffled about her brother’s decision. But she isn’t bitter about it; her attitude is that she has had a full and eventful life of her own—husband, kids, friends—and that if her brother wanted to keep himself aloof she respected his decision. She describes the conversations they had when they did speak: “They always had to be focused on something, like a movie, because you couldn’t afford to be very intimate. There had to be something that would get in the way of the intimacy.” And when she phoned him during his illness it was the same way. “He never gave that up,” she says, sounding more wistful than reproachful. “He never learned how to be comfortable with me.” So it has been a trying set of circumstances all around. “The hypocrisy that surrounds this issue is so thick you could chew it,” Shirley says wearily.
Shirley’s husband died several months before Anatole, and I think she must have found it cheering to be able to meet family members who had been sequestered from her. She says that she wants to get to know her nephew and her niece—that there’s a lot of time to make up. “I’ve been encouraging Bliss to come and talk, and we had lunch, and she calls me on the phone. She’s really responded very well. Considering that it’s sort of last-minute.”
Years earlier, in an essay entitled “Growing Up Irrational,” Anatole Broyard wrote, “I descended from my mother and father. I was extracted from them.” His parents were “a conspiracy, a plot against society,” as he saw it, but also a source of profound embarrassment. “Like every great tradition, my family had to die before I could understand how much I missed them and what they meant to me. When they went into the flames at the crematorium, all my letters of introduction went with them.” Now that he had a wife and family of his own, he had started to worry about whether his children’s feelings about him would reprise his feelings about his parents: “Am I an embarrassment to them, or an accepted part of the human comedy? Have they joined my conspiracy, or are they just pretending? Do they understand that, after all those years of running away from home, I am still trying to get back?”
SOURCE: The New Yorker, June 17, 1996, pp. 66–81.
BLISS BROYARD
WHEN I BEGAN this project, there was one person whose family history interested me perhaps more than any other: Anatole Broyard, the black writer and longtime literary critic for the New York Times who passed as a white man for most of his life. My interest was simple and highly personal: I had researched Anatole in great detail for an essay that I wrote about him more than a decade ago—and his story still haunts me today. And it haunts me because of its typicality, as complex as it is, toward what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “cosmopolitanism.” And cosmopolitanism in the black tradition has many forms.
Anatole Broyard was born on July 16, 1920, in New Orleans to Paul Broyard and Edna Miller. He and his parents were black people with light complexions. Anatole was their only son. He had two sisters: One shared his complexion—that is, was not discernibly black—while the other was much darker (the inheritance of melanin is imprecise). In all records and by all accounts, the family was identified as Negro and identified itself as Negro. But when Anato
le was still a child, the Broyards moved north to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, thus joining the Great Migration that took hundreds of thousands of southern blacks to northern cities and that took the ancestors of so many people in this book to the North as well.
In the French Quarter, Anatole’s father, Paul, had been a legendary dancer, beau, and galant. Brooklyn was a less welcoming environment. Though Paul Broyard arrived there a master carpenter, he soon discovered that the carpenters’ union was not favorably inclined toward colored applicants. A stranger in a strange city, Paul decided to pass as white in order to join the union and get work. It was strictly a professional decision, which affected his career and nothing else. But his son, Anatole, would make the same decision and expand on it, passing for white in every area of his life—working at the Times; living in Southport, Connecticut; and raising two children who believed he was white, in the process alienating himself from his mother and his siblings and countless others from his black past. He died in 1990, having kept his secret from all but a few friends and associates for more than five decades.
I never met Anatole Broyard. I read him regularly in the New York Times for years—and admired his writing while troubling myself over his secret, which, unlike the vast majority of his readers, I knew. I knew. I was told that Anatole was black in 1975, when I was twenty-five years old, by my mentor, Charles T. Davis, the first African American to be tenured in the Yale English department. Charles and his wife, Jean Curtis Davis, were friends with Broyard’s sister and brother-in-law, the former ambassador Franklin Williams and his wife, Shirley. Because they knew Shirley so well, they knew all about Anatole’s family’s past. They were highly amused that the Times was unwittingly employing someone who was passing for a white man. I was fascinated and disturbed by this fact. And when Broyard died, I decided to explore it. I interviewed many people who knew him, used a genealogist to track down his family’s records in the Louisiana state archives, then published an essay about his life in the New Yorker.
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